Thursday August 25, 2011

From kindergarteners to college co-eds, today's schools are
filled with what author Marc Prensky called "Digital Natives"
almost a decade ago. Now in class at all educational levels,
these Digital Natives and their computers, video games, smartphones
and social networks continue to inspire a lot of research on how
best to use technology in the classroom to facilitate
learning. It's more than a generational change of
fashion. Technology is literally creating new ways of
thinking and learning. You might say the Web is the ultimate
field trip. But forget off-campus.

Technology professionals working in education are exploring an
idea called "Above-Campus Services," an more incarnation of cloud
computing in an educational environment. As a joint article by the
CIOs of the University of Indiana and UC Berkeley explained:

"The term above-campus
services may frame institutional objectives for IT service
aggregation better than the common, all-industries notion of
clouds. Above-campus means that for a particular IT service, a
sufficient level of aggregation for efficiency cannot be achieved
within one campus but, rather, must be achieved at a higher level
of aggregation, beyond a single institution. Efficiencies may be
realized in aggregating personnel, expertise, licensing, business
continuity, and other benefits far beyond simply joining computer
hardware.

For IT professionals in education, the subject of cloud
computing is multifaceted. A new report by the State
Education Technology Directors Association defines four key
strategies for achieving education goals:

Building a 21st Century Infrastructure

Supporting Educator Effectiveness

Developing and Scaling Innovative Learning Models

Preparing All Students for College and 21st Century
Careers

These strategies impact student-facing services, cloud-based
learning management systems and back-end infrastructure. They
are also instructive for service providers who want to target
education for cloud computing services. At all levels of the
public sector, there is tremendous momentum for moving toward the
cloud. A recent
tracking poll by CDW found that 74 percent of public sector
institutions are adopting or planning to adopt cloud
services. Despite a weak economy and efforts to minimize
government spending, the poll indicated public support for
investing in education technology. For the 2011-12 academic
year, education IT professionals believed their IT budget would
either increase (26.5%) or remain the same (37.0%).

The stakes are just as high, and in some ways higher, than cloud
computing in the enterprise. There's a special urgency when your
users are children, especially in terms of privacy and
security. In fact the stakes are so high, worldwide, that the
United Nations has weighed in
with a policy brief. In their analysis, the UNESCO
Institute for Information Technology in Education outlines some
of the unique issues that shape an educational institution's cloud
computing decisions, including "unique requirements relating to
their teaching methods, examination regulations, funding regimes,
government policies and legal issues..."

The benefits of cloud computing in education are already beginning
to overshadow the complexities and challenges. CDW's poll found
that higher education is second only to large enterprises in cloud
services initiatives, with 34 percent of higher education
institutions in the cloud compared to 37 percent of large
enterprises. Not to be outdone by their college colleagues,
27 percent of K-12 educational institutions said they are
implementing cloud services or are already maintaining them.
When asked about more basic cloud services such as
Google Docs and Gmail, the number grows to 87 percent. Service
providers clearly have opportunities to benefit from cloud services
interest and investment in public education at all levels.